Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/why-do-anything.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524250)

<comment><USER3> Hacker Rehash News

This new algorithm is really annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author conflates procrastination, idleness and perfectionism, as if they were interchangeable. I would argue that they are not, even if they appear to be similar, at the surface.

While perfectionism CAN sometimes lead to procrastination and procrastination _occasionally_ manifests itself as idleness, they are distinctly different phenomena arising from different mental states.

But that's not all. Read the column a little bit further and you find the author introduces _yet_ another romantic notion to support his argument: nothingness.

> Idleness, then, reveals an experience of nothingness. While nothingness > tends to occupy a central position in Eastern traditions like Buddhism and > Taoism...

Nothingness ("Shunyata", in Sanskrit) is not about idleness or vacuum but means something very specific. It refers to the absence of a solid, tangible _self_ (or an ego, if you must use a Western term). Buddhism's core practice is often mis-interpreted as "don't do something, sit there!" but it couldn't be farther from the truth.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism's idea of "nothingness" is not about inactivity but about keeping the "self" out of activity.

<comment><USER5> >First, the author conflates procrastination, idleness and perfectionism, as if they were interchangeable

But he distinguishes them later:

 _The drama of procrastination comes from its split nature. Just like the architect from Shiraz, the procrastinator is smitten by the perfect picture of that which is yet to be born; he falls under the spell of all that purity and splendor. What he is beholding is something whole, uncorrupted by time, untainted by the workings of a messed-up world. At the same time, though, the procrastinator is fully aware that all that has to go. No sooner does he get a glimpse of the perfection that precedes actualization than he is doomed to become part of the actualization process himself, to be the one who defaces the ideal and brings into the world a precarious copy, unlike the architect who saves it by burning the plans._

So in this view procrastination is not his idealized perfectionism ("burning the plans") or his idealized idleness ("intuiting a cosmic meaninglessness, which comes along with the realization that, with every action, we get only more entangled in the universal farce"). It has a split nature that's the worst of both.

Also it's possible that his reference to nothingness doesn't mean sunyata, but "making no karma" by not participating in samsara.

<comment><USER4> Re "samsara", I am sure you know that in the Hindu/Buddhist sense it is more than just the physical samsara, whereas idleness necessarily refers to inaction.

By avoiding action and therefore responsibility, one could still be awfully entangled in _samsara_. (Just ask any developer who's browsing HN or Reddit _while_ struggling to meet a deadline!)

That said, I did like your interpretation of "making no karma", even though Buddhism makes it very clear that karma-making occurs even with the _skandhas_ , the "sense-gate" or mental/emotional fabrications.

<comment><USER5> Yes, in the Buddhist view, you accumulate karma no matter what you're doing (even if you're procrastinating something), so long as you have an idea of self. So the only way to "really do nothing" is to free yourself from samsara (not a physical place, but the continuity of craving).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with the premise that perfection can only exist before creation, but I disagree with the conclusion. Creation does not destroy something perfect, rather it creates an entirely new thing. If your attempts to realize your perfect idea destroy it, it is because you discovered the flaws in your idea in the process.

Let's take architecture for example, and lets make Frank Lloyd Wright the architect. Wright created some of the most beautiful designs ever. However, I've visited a lot of his houses, and I think they make terrible houses. Wright's designs ignored many of the aspects of what makes a home good. His houses are beautiful in the sculptural sense, but in reality they were failures as houses. Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the first place.

That being said, Wright was a visionary designer, and I'd highly recommend touring a Wright-designed building if you have a chance.

<comment><USER7> > If your attempts to realize your perfect idea destroy it, it is because you > discovered the flaws in your idea in the process.

It doesn't have to be. I think my main disagreement with what you're saying starts with how you allude to the idea of idea possession. What is "your idea"? What does this mean? Many perfect ideas appear universal. Who "came up" with the idea of the perfect sphere? Or the idea of love? Or the idea of adventure? Notice how, when you try to realize any of these ideas, you fall short.

People who created this, for example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque)

are betting that universal ideas do indeed exist, and that intelligent enough creatures are bound to have them.

When you realize something imperfect, you are bound to lose some connection with the perfect idea that you started with. This does not mean there was something wrong with the original idea, that it was "bad" or "wrong" in some sense. You cannot create a perfect sphere, but is the idea of a perfect sphere bad or wrong?

> Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the > first place.

About your example with Lloyd Wright: that perfection existed in a sense. It existed in his mind. Maybe not the plan for the house that would actually be executed, but the idea, the feeling of living in such a house. Where do you draw the border between pure concept and practicalities?

I remember being a kid and wanting to create computer games. I had very clear ideas on how the best game ever should feel like. The things I actually created were shit, and ended up destroying my ability to preserve these initial feeling of an ideal game. Don't you see how doing can be destructive in the realm of ideas?

It is funny that what I am saying here does not feel controversial to me (famous thinkers said this sort of thing millennia ago), but it does feel blasphemous in current western society. We worship productivity, and forget to question the very idea of productivity to begin with.

<comment><USER6> I agree with everything you said, except I think a perfect idea would be perfect regardless of any imperfect executions. Your vision for a game might still be perfect, but you might derive less pleasure from thinking about it because those thoughts are now tangled up with your feelings of failure.

For another metaphor, the imagined perfection of a member of the opposite sex, and the inability of reality to match that expectation, is a consistent trope in art and media. Happy Together, by the Turtles, pretty much any song written by River Cuomo (Weezer), 500 Days of Summer, etc.

I think the issue is that our individual understanding of perfection is flawed. Perfection is more like Plato's forms, in the sense that something perfect might exist, but we can only begin to imagine what that is. Perhaps Plato is right, and perfection cannot exist in reality, but failure to attain perfection in reality would not cause the true form of something to be any less true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because what's better than procrastinate reading an article about procrastination?

<comment><USER9> If you ignore any problem long enough, it goes away.

<comment><USER10> Death comes to those who wait.

<comment><USER4> As it does to those who don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gnosticism was an amazingly diverse and interesting phenomenon, and this article does not do it justice by oversimplifying so and making it appear so black and white.

Some Gnostics did believe the demiurge was merely mistaken (arrogantly thinking himself the only true God or blundering in creating when trying to imitate the creation of the true God), others believed him insane, or even intentionally evil.

At root, the Gnostics were wrestling with the problem of evil. That is, how can evil exist in the world (or how can this world be as evil as it is) if God is perfectly good, omniscient, and ominipotent? To perhaps oversimplify it even further: how can imperfection arise out of perfection?

Their solution was to say that "true" God didn't create the world, and didn't create evil, but rather that it was the demiurge (and his minions, the archons) that did it. This demiurge was the creator God of the Old Testament, the false God that what has come to be mainstream Christianity worships.

The Gnostics tried to put as much cosmological distance as possible between their true God and the demiurge. To them not only did the true God not create the world, but he didn't even create the demiurge. The demiurge was created by an intermediary, who mistakenly tried to imitate the true God and created the demiurge.

They further distanced the evil material world that was the creation of the demiurge from the perfect realm of the true God by positing the existance of many intermediary realms and intermediary superhuman beings, each less perfect than the last, the further they get away from the true God and the closer they get to this evil world.

The result is that in their eyes the true God is absolved of responsibility for evil or this evil world, and he can remain perfect, omniscient, and ominpotent as he is infinitely remote from the muck that us material beings dwell in. But humans have a divine spark in them, and are capable of realizing their divine origin and thereby escaping the material prison they are trapped in.. but that is a story for another day.

There's a lot more to say about the Gnostics and their beliefs, but I'll just note that decades ago scholars were debating whether to abandon the terms "Gnostic" and "Gnosticism", as the people and beliefs so designated were so different from each other that using a single term for them would be misleading.

It's a bit like "Hinduism", which is not a single religion at all, but could be thought of as a family of religions, with many different and often conflicting beliefs. So what I say above (and what the original article says) about gnostic beliefs does not necessarily apply to all or even most Gnostics.

Anyone interested in learning more about this is encouraged to read the Wikipedia articles on Gnosticism (which are actually pretty good) and some books. Pagels' books are some of the most popular. But her perspective on Gnosticism is itself but one of many. Hans Jonas is a fascinating source, especially for his additional link to Heidegger. An interesting fictional, non-scholarly source is Philip K Dick, who incorporated his own reimagining of Gnostic ideas in to much of his own work.

</comment><comment><USER12> the virtue in doing is that it's a lot harder than not doing.

<comment><USER13> What's the connection between hard and virtuous?

<comment><USER14> A lot of English words have been drained of their meaning in the past 150 years[1]. Now when people say "virtue" they almost exclusively mean "some morally positive quality" like patience, kindness, or diligence. But the word virtue comes from the Latin word "vir" meaning "man", and had meanings like "valor, merit, moral perfection". You can sort of already see just by the fact that it started at the word "man" that it was associated with _actions_ that men (humans) can perform. And the words "valor" and "merit" come from Latin words respectively meaning to be strong, and to get what you earned. Putting these together, it's sort of clear that the original deeper meaning of the English word "virtue" had a lot more to do with earning via hard work. It's evident that things like patience and kindness need to be "worked for". You can also see this in the phrase "by virtue of", meaning "be-cause of" (or "caused by"), that virtue is associated with cause and therefore action.

[1]: on archive.org I found a book that I wanted so much that I converted it to a black and white PDF and printed a hard cover copy for myself on lulu.com; but first I had to find the right version, since the original book was written in Spanish; so I compared the various English translations ranging from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and at some point in the middle 1800s, the words it chose when translating were _wayyyy_ less accurate than alternative ones. It seems that they chose what we would call more "modern" words, or at least words with more modern definitions to our own sensibilities, to translate these words, and then it just kept snowballing. I still don't know the cause of this, but I'm pretty annoyed by it. Because dammit, affection is a way different noun than love or even charity, and you completely miss the meaning of a sentence from the original author's perspective when it's not translated accuratel.

<comment><USER15> Posts like this are why I always check the comments. I don't think I would have had this thought shared with me anywhere else. Having said that, I'm still unsure how to interpret the Oscar Wilde quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm going to read this later.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed? - <AUTHOR> I just looked at a 1500/mo apartment that requires 250k net worth if you don't have an income.
I have savings, but not that kind of savings.. <comment><USER2> I've never run into any kind of problem like that here in SF. I do find that landlords say they "need" all of these crazy things but in reality all they care about is a deposit and first month's rent. The first person to hand that to them will get the apartment.

I spent a whole month looking for apartments the old fashioned way when I first moved to SF - filling out applications, sending in credit repots, dealing with the unreasonable requirements landlords put up. Finally got tired, when I was looking at a house said "I can give you a check for the deposit now" -- suddenly all his requirements went away and I had a place.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, I was self employed up until about a month ago, and have been during all my landlord negotiations here in SF.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, looking at all the answers here I think I need to steer clear of managed companies. That explains all the discrepancies in my experience.

Unfortunately it's hard to find a cheap studio from a private landlord. So that leaves only finding roommates. Except I live with my girlfriend. After convincing her it was important to downsize I hate to put her through another level of inconvenience.

<comment><USER2> I don't know about it being that difficult. It's _stressful_ \-- definitely. The thing I've noticed about San Francisco is the best apartments aren't available in advance. They go on the market a week or so before they're ready to move in. The frustrating part here is that you have to put in your 30-day notice at your previous apartment before you have a new place -- super stressful (unless you're willing to pay double-rent for a bit, which is often times economical given the rent break you get in the new place).

I've had pretty good luck with Craigslist, subscribing to feed(s) of the various neighborhood/price ranges I'm looking in and _hounding_ that feed. A lot of places are only up on CL for a few hours before they're taken down or have a waiting list impossibly long.

On a related note: it may be _much_ easier if you don't look for studios. While San Francisco is an older city -- most of the older buildings you'd expect to find lofts/studios in burned/collapsed in previous decades. The result is most of the housing in the city comes from split up Victorian/Edwardian homes -- one bedroom apartments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am self employed, have proof of good earnings, have tax return from last year of more than $350k and an almost-800 point credit score -- and I've still had problems renting here in San Francisco.

My gf and I applied to a $3700/month place we can easily afford on my earnings alone and the landlord was really concerned by the fact we were both self- employed. She wanted to see _all_ of my tax return from last year, all invoices from this year, etc etc -- which I wouldn't show as it's too far IMHO.

It's not legal to discriminant here in SF, not even on income type -- but its difficult one to argue.

The rental market is hot here, even now and good tenants can be found. I also know two cases of friends working on startups and not having a year's personal runway on the places they were renting during a startup. With no income, things got too tight and they had to walk away from a place and break their lease.

A lot of landlords have had this happen to them over the years in SF, and the irresponsible behavior of these particular tenants has damaged things for all of us.

Finally, a lot of my industry friends who have sold companies are landlords themselves here in SF -- they know the risks and (sadly) won't expose themselves to the same risks that they won big on. It's a shame. One company I advise, however, rents their place in return for stock in the company as the property owner is a VC.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is the SF rent control laws make it extremely difficult to evict non-payers which causes landlords to up-regulate their choosiness to avoid any possible problems until risk and reward once again meet.

Sadder still is that SF law makes it next to impossible to evict the physically challenged. I have a blind friend who has told me this has made it impossible for him to rent a decent place in the city.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you mean to say that the sad thing is SF isn't protecting the blind from being discriminated against?

<comment><USER6> I think the point was that laws that are meant to protect some categories of people can end up hurting them more.

Most people's instinctive reaction would be "let's add another anti- discrimination law". The post gives an example of how that approach can fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What do you mean by self-employed if you don't have an income? If you are a contractor (such as myself) you should be fine with whatever tax-related paperwork you have, such as a 1099. If you're trying to start up, I'd second the suggestions of looking for a roommate, if you can bear the thought of it. If you're like me and can't imagine having a roommate, look for a place that's for rent by owner or another similar situation where you would have the opportunity to sit down face to face with someone not bound by corporate policy and try to reach an arrangement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I'm new to this. By self-employed I meant "not unemployed", ie I'm not looking for work. Just living off savings, trying to do something by myself. Thanks for the suggestions.

<comment><USER8> You may not be "unemployed" for the purposes of govt unemployment statistics, but you are unemployed; you're not employed. More relevant to a potential landlord, you don't have an income that will pay the rent. Ie, your runway is not indefinite, and presumably you can't show that it is "long enough".

<comment><AUTHOR> So 250k is what constitutes 'long enough'?

Thanks for pointing out what problems the landlord has. I asked how others here cope with the problem in similar situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My problems are compounded by having a big dog, and planning to spend more than $1500/mo on a place (I'm looking for a townhouse or a duplex on the outskirts of SF in the $2.1k range). So, I've been looking for quite some time, but not finding much that fits my needs (I'm in Mountain View, currently).

I've talked to my current landlord about how pervasive this problem is in this area in the past, and it's partially a side effect of how hard it is to evict someone in California. It costs a fortune and takes several months from the time you actually stop paying rent for your landlord to kick you out of your home in CA. So, property owners do everything they can to make sure the cost of you declaring bankruptcy or other tactics to avoid paying your rent while still living there are higher for you than for them. It's one of those unintended consequences of regulations intended to help poor people; it actually hurts the poor the most, since people with high net worth don't have any problems jumping through these hoops, but poor folks get stuck living in the absolute worst locations and paying exorbitant prices because no one else will deal with them.

If you deal with folks who have decision making powers within the company, showing historic tax records indicating you can make the payments, or showing a history of paying similar rents on time and for a long period of time, may be enough. When I moved out here, I had to show I had been making mortgage payments on a house in Austin for several years. My tax records weren't very impressive since I had shut down my prior company two years prior and hadn't started making much money with Virtualmin yet. Landlord also wanted an email confirmation from YC that we actually had some kind of funding, and had some expectation of making money.

A friend of mine was able to get a place, despite having low net worth, no credit history to speak of, and no historic tax records to speak of, and no history of paying similar rents, by just showing pay stubs from her current job which pays enough to cover her rent. But, I would guess that would be dependent on having a job, and dealing with someone that could make a judgment call and has the power to accept a lease from someone without all that other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> I faced this and after being denied I offered to write a check for the entire year right then. At that point it was insinuated that I must deal drugs. Fools are absolutely infuriating. I had luck finding an owner who's an actual human in the full sense of the word much like the people I normally work with in business. At that point it's like any other deal. I think the key, as always, is to keep trying.

<comment><USER11> Had a similar scumbag slumlord who, when I attempted to push the rate at which our under-renovation once-beautiful brick building on the border of open air drug markets was being renovated (it wasn't even in compliance with codes, no certificate of occupancy, when we moved in) by offering an advance on rent. I was at home rather frequently as I telecommuted to my webmaster/tech lead job at the city newspaper, but still, similar BS attitudes. Renting sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't know about SF, but here's what I've found elsewhere:

\- Commercial landlords have policies, and you're dealing with people who don't have the incentive or power to change them. With private landlords, you can talk to them and make a case you'll be a good tenant, they'll take you on.

\- Use references. Past landlords are great, but investors can be impressive too. Line up some letters on official stationery.

\- If you've got a blog, or public site, or coverage, you can use those to woo landlords too.

Landlords want someone who will pay the rent, not trash the place, not bother them, and stay a long time. Keep those in mind, and figure out how to sell yourself as a good tenant, and hopefully the formalities shouldn't be an obstacle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those tips.

The one major structural obstacle is that cheap studios rarely come from private landlords, so we have to look one step up at 1-bedrooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The trick is using university/college off-campus housing listing pages. You'll find great deals. Here's the one from SFSU: <http://sfstate.och101.com/> "Spacious Studio in Nagley Mansion" $850.00 Also check UofSF, UCSF.

I wouldn't be discouraged by that offer. Like in business, some landlords prefer to wait for that A+ tenant and take a premium, whereas other deals in bulk or have cashflow problems so they need to fill the place sooner. There are HUGE price differences. In Toronto, my friends once rented a whole house in an upper class area (the Annex) for the price of a 1-bedroom apartment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another idea might be to rent in Oakland/East Bay - the rental market is much different there and you will get more for your money. Landlords are, frankly, less snobbish then in SF from what I've seen second-hand via friends who've rented there.

I know a lot of startup'ers who BART in from the East Bay to hang out in SoMa during the day and then travel back out -- it's quite convenient and cost- effective.

The downside is that many parts of Oakland are not ideal to live in, esp if you have a girlfriend (personal safety, etc) -- however you might feel the sacrifice is worth it in this situation.

<comment><USER14> For the East Bay I would look at Rockridge, Piedmont, parts of the Oakland Hills such as Montclair and parts of Emeryville. Rockridge is the most convienent to BART, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here are some good tips for self-employed apartment hunting in San Francisco:

1) Don't go to a rental company. Citiapartments sucks anyways, they are crooks. 2) Walk around and take numbers off of buildings. The best apartments never go on craigslist. 3) Network hard. You won't believe how many apartments I got because I knew someone. I'm in a place in Nob Hill because I knew a girl who was moving to CT. She'd lived here ten years, and I took the place over from her with her rent control intact. I pay $1300 for a two bedroom with a stunning view of the southern part of town. Of course, when times are tough I also know where to get a $250 office space I can sleep in because of my networking. 4) Bring your own credit reports.

That's really all I can say - I have been under- or self-employed for the better part of a decade, and I've never had a problem finding a place to live. I do have years of networking in this town too though so your mileage may vary.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't help with SF, but I've been looking in the Boston-North area for a while, and in my experience apartment companies require a years worth of proof so that you can prove you can pay off the lease. I dropped the apartment market a while back and have been strictly looking at condos - which do require a more stringent investigation into your finances.

Is living in SF a must - how are the burbs or just outside of SF comparable? You may be able to find something for less a month and also easier on the financial investigation.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER17> Might be obvious but find a roommate that is renting out a room, then you don't have to deal with any of those issues.

Just find a quiet one or one that is out a lot so that you being home all the time does not bother either of you.

You may even catch a break with one that has a dog and you offer to walk it in the afternoons during a coding break. Most people who have pets would love someone to walk them during an afternoon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I have a girlfriend, but maybe we have to go this route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you have steady income, use your tax documents and bank records to prove your income.

If you don't have income, can you afford the rent through the termination of the lease? If you may not be able to, then you might need to room with someone else or get a cosigner for your lease. If you can then find out whether you can place a deposit or pay in advance (e.g. last months, last 2 months, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Find someone in SF looking for a roommate? (I just moved back to SOMA from Afghanistan and am moving into a huge commercial space live/work with someone and one empty spot, starting in January)

<comment><USER20> octal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My roommate and I pay more than that for our place on Haight st. Getting an apartment isn't hard. We make moderately good income and getting a place wasn't hard at all.

</comment><comment><USER22> sublet. or find a non-professional landlord. look around on craigslist. there's plenty of people in trouble trying to get out of their lease.

Of course, I've not lived in the city proper, but I've lived in the bay area on and off for most of my adult life, and I've not had any trouble avoiding the corporate landlords who have funny rules.

My experience has been that the non-professionals usually have better prices, too.

</comment><comment><USER23> super big deposit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I'll check.

It kinda sucks though to have your cash tied up right when you need it most.

<comment><USER24> The idea that you may need your cash for something besides rent is exactly the landlord's concern.

<comment><USER3> For me this comment hits the nail on the head...

You either offer to pay all/half of the year's rent in one go (and ask for a discount for the privilege) because you have it now and u prob don't expect to have cash flow during that time

..or you actually can't afford a year's lease on current savings, in which case it's unlikely you can afford the place assuming no real cash flow during the first year of a start up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lie.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think most of us living in SF have income and/or 250k in net worth.

</comment><comment><USER27> Get into politics, and try to convince the people of SF that rent control is stupid and needs to be done away with, use yourself as an example. Well that's a good long term plan, in the short term, I'm afraid you might be screwed.</comment>


AWS experiencing connectivity issues - <AUTHOR> https://status.aws.amazon.com/ <comment><USER2> I guess that's why Discord is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I thought it was my internet connection this morning. Spent like a half hour trying to debug router issues only to realize that it's AWS. So many sites aren't/weren't working. I can't even access the console.</comment></comment>


DependenCI: Continous Integration Tool for Composer - <AUTHOR> https://dependenci.miguelpiedrafita.com?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> I'm ignorant. What is composer?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a dependency manager for PHP

<comment><USER2> Thank you. As stupid as this sounds, it might expand the potential user base to mention PHP and what Composer is in the landing page copy. The reason is that the potential pool of DependenCI users is anyone who uses PHP so mentioning PHP lets more people know that DependenCI might be applicable to them. Mentioning the problem Composer solves, might put some PHP developers who are not using Composer into the funnel that leads to using DependenCI.

There is always a balance between boiling the ocean and focus. But a lot of B2B 'sales' is educating _potential_ customers. Clearly, DependenCI is based on the idea that using Composer is a good idea. Spreading that knowledge expands the user base.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Coderbits Vs. Github Vs. Coderwall - <AUTHOR>

Recently I started using coderbits which is simply a online resume(this is a over simplification mind you but still you get the idea). In the same way that github & coderwall is a resume. If you were an employer or anybody looking for talent which would you prefer a strong github account or a strong coderbits account or a strong coderwall? About coder bits https://coderbits.com/about. I have tried coderwall and I really didn't like it, it wasn't about your skills it was about you selling yourself to the highest bidder. <comment><USER2> I don't think this is an either or thing here. Coderbits is different from github. Coderbits is about validating claims of proficiency by pulling data from various online sources, and github is one of those sources.

I would say Coderbits in in competition with [Coderwall](<https://coderwall.com>), and from first impressions, yeah I'd prefer bits over wall. And also in competition with Stack Overflow careers.

<comment><USER3> This is the goal we had in mind when designing coderbits, we realized there are a lot of employers who are/should be looking at real metrics for employee quality like source code quality, knowledge, etc - the simplified idea is that your work should speak for itself. So your stack overflow score and your github repos are just a part of who you are as a developer, and although two fantastic sources of information, not a complete profile or portfolio. Our direct competition is the traditional resume.

<comment><USER2> Heh, I was actually thinking about how Coderbits would be an excellent replacement for the traditional resume.

It looks really good, nice job. Just need to add a "Make a PDF" option for those pesky companies where hiring is done by MBA/HR @#%#### and it'll be complete.

<comment><USER3> Ooh like a "destroy the system from within the system" feature. I like it. Into the trello ideas board!

Thanks for the feedback, nice to hear.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why are bones not made of steel? (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.materialstoday.com/mechanical-properties/news/why-are-your-bones-not-made-of-steel/ <comment><USER3> From "the social function of intellect"[1]: "Henry Ford, it is said, commissioned a survey of the car scrap yards of America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Ford which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons - <USER2> were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in future they should be made to an inferior specification. Nature is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford. It is not her habit to tolerate needless extravagance in the animals on her production lines: superfluous capacity is trimmed back, new capacity added only as and when it is needed"

[1] [http://biology.unm.edu/pwatson/Humphrey%20The%20Social%20Fun...](http://biology.unm.edu/pwatson/Humphrey%20The%20Social%20Function%20of%20Intellect.pdf)

<comment><USER4> > It is not her habit to tolerate needless extravagance in the animals on her > production lines: superfluous capacity is trimmed back, new capacity added > only as and when it is needed

It's not exactly wrong, but it's way too anthropomorphic and attributes way too much intent.

Plus there's plenty of natural stuff which at least looks way over-engineered or redundant/unnecessary in its current form. The Mantis Shrimp's eyes for instance. The gallbladder also seems mostly redundant, and while one can argue that the lobed paired design of lungs is necessary considering the common occurrence of respiratory diseases redundant kidneys seem less than necessary.

<comment><USER5> I'll keep my paired lungs. Had one spontaneously collapse about 10 years ago, and had there not been a second in it's own pleural cavity, it would've been a much worse time for me.

As an aside, one really cool thing that happens in the case of a collapsed lung, is the trachea will shift toward the healthy side under less pressure. Called a tracheal deviation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_deviation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracheal_deviation)

<comment><USER6> Tracheal deviation in the instance of lung collapse is a sign of a developing fatal condition, tension pneumothorax. Cool for me as a doctor because I get to stab a big needle through your chest. Not so cool for the patient

<comment><USER7> Also cool for Mad Max.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bone is an organ with multiple functions beyond structural support. It creates a reservoir for calcium and phosphate homeostasis and of course contains bone marrow. It also has attachments for muscles and connective tissue, and adapts to environmental conditions (eg see a tennis player's forearm). A titanium bone could do none of these things. The question should really be why are bones not reinforced with metal or metal composites. In general if greater strength is needed it can be achieved with thicker bone, which has a far lower evolutionary barrier than eg metal composite bones. Additionally, the material properties of the whole biomechanical apparatus need to be considered. A super strong skinny thigh bone isn't much good if the area available for ligamentous attachment is so small that the tendons keep tearing. Most injuries involve connective tissue and muscle rather than bone.

<comment><USER9> Not to mention the role of bone in blood cell synthesis!

The bone is a fascinating organ and sadly misunderstood by most people. They are, essentially, living rocks. Our bones are innervated, full of living cells, and constantly engaging in a chemical equilibrium with the body on CaPO4 as you point out.

Furthermore, the bone needs to grow along with the creature. It has to be soft enough to accommodate childbirth but allow growth and hardening as the organism matures. The process by which this occurs in natural bone is complex and remarkable.

Metal bones can't do any of this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surprised that this totally blows past the chemical reasons why not. There's an excellent answer by shigeta on the Biology Stack Exchange[1] to this very question.

His major answers are that electrical conductivity is likely to be a huge problem for the nervous system, and that iron and aluminum readily oxidize (aka rust). Iron oxidization is useful in hemoglobin but would be problematic in your bones, and while a body could be designed with conductivity in mind, it would at minimum also take a reworking the nervous system.

1: [https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/9419/4101](https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/9419/4101)

<comment><USER11> What you pointed out is a very astute answer, but comes from a creationist perspective rather than an evolutionary perspective. His main answer is:

> Firstly, fully reduced (oxidation state 0) metal has a high energetic cost > to create in reduced form.

Basically, it takes a ton of energy to make steel. We are literally burning gigagallons of over a billions years worth of pressurized organic matter to have made all of the steel we have made in the past century and a half or so. We could make a super inaccurate but somewhat plausible estimation that we have used something like 150 million years worth of the entire earth's lifeforms at the time's dead bodies and converted that into 150 years worth of steel. So if my orders of magnitude are correct...it would be something like a million times more difficult energy-wise for an organisms to create steel from scratch than calcium-based hardened material.

That's assuming we have burned through 15% of a billion years worth of oil from bacteria, that 100% of the bacteria converted into oil and then converted directly into steel, and that there was only a billion years of bacteria to oil creation. I am sure these numbers are off, but maybe that means it's only 100,000 times or 10 million times more difficult for organisms to make steel rather than bones.

<comment><USER12> How is it Creationist? Creationism is just a metaphor for evolution plus a fictional goal of evolving toward specific human form.

<comment><USER13> Creationism is not "just a metaphor for evolution." It is a word which covers a wide range of beliefs, include those who argue that each species was the result of a specific act of divine creation.

("In Creationism, special creation is a theological doctrine which states that the universe and all life in it originated in its present form by unconditional fiat or divine decree." \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_creation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_creation) )

Take this quote from "The Vanishing Case for Evolution" by Henry Morris, [http://www.icr.org/article/vanishing-case-for- evolution/](http://www.icr.org/article/vanishing-case-for-evolution/) one of the founders of the Institute for Creation Research:

> The absence of evidence for evolution does not, by itself, prove creation, > of course; nevertheless, special creation is clearly the only alternative to > evolution.

How can special creation - one type of creationism - be both a "metaphor for evolution" and "the only alternative to evolution"?

Obviously it can't, which is why it's incorrect to summarize creationism as you did.

Progressive creationism is more accepting of evolution, in that it says "microevolution" occurs but "macroevolution" does not. Even this cannot be seen as a metaphor for evolution, because it rejects part of evolution.

Perhaps theistic evolution fits your description ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution) ) but otherwise most types of creationism do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >> But if you had metal bones they wouldn't ever need repairing: titanium alloy for example has a fatigue strength of about 500MPa which is more than five times greater than the stresses that it would experience in its life as a bone.

It's worth remembering that Calcium (the substance bones are made of) is, in fact, a metal [1]. And our bodies have no problem growing and repairing our bones. Why wouldn't that happen with steel?

Also- the bit about the stresses that a titanium alloy bone would experience in its lifetime- yeah, that, probably. We probably have bones as tough as they need to be, or _needed_ to be in the last million or so years.

________________

[1] A factoid that my 16 year-old self, obsessed with Metal (the music) found deeply satisfying. "Dude, my bones are made of METAL".

<comment><USER15> The calcium in bones is pretty much all in the form of calcium phosphate, which behaves very differently from a pure metal, e.g. with respect to conductivity. Saying that bones are made of metal is a bit like saying that stone is made of metal.

<comment><USER16> But... that's exactly what ore is: Stone made partially of metal.

<comment><USER17> Metal as a material is different from metal elements. Metal element atoms are common - most kinds of rock contain them. Metal as a material, by contrast, has metallic bonding, where electrons are delocalized across many atoms. This is what gives metal materials all their special properties. The metal atoms in rock do not have metallic bonding; they have covalent and ionic bonding to nonmetal atoms like oxygen. Therefore rock does not contain metal the material, even though it contains metal elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "...why have our bodies, and those of other animals, evolved so as to make the particular structural materials that they do make, and not to make others, especially metals..."

Because that's what's good enough to get through the crucible of successful genome transmission? Evolution doesn't have an end goal; every "improvement" came about by random changes, either in the genome or in the environment, which yielded a reproductive advantage to some new gene or genes. I'm not sure if the author intended it but this seems to fall into the common fallacy of believing that evolution is an active process guiding organism toward some optimal state. Organisms don't evolve "to do" anything. They end up there. Contemporary genomes are what's left after everything else has died. Not the conquerors of mountains.

<comment><USER19> Evolution is one of the hardest things to actually fully integrate into a mental model. There are so many subtleties that just do not interact well with our tendency to ascribe motivation to stuff.

<comment><USER18> It seems fairly intuitive to me. Think of a bunch of marbles falling through a series of nets. Changes in a particular marble, or in a particular net, might let the marble fall through. Marbles that fall through one net get to try again with the next net. Evolution just means comparing marbles that collect in each net. There's a million answers to the question "how can a marble get through this net", and the nets don't care if anything gets through at all.

<comment><USER19> FWIW, I don't think the analogy you described is what many people would describe as "fairly intuitive", though I think it's a reasonable one.

Still, it relies on harnessing our spatial reasoning and I don't think most people are good at visualizing or reasoning about billions of marbles being sifted through billions of nets (in the case of simpler organisms) or even millions of marbles being sifted through ~7,000 nets (in the specific case of humans).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Then there is also the evolutionist's reply to this question: because the ocean has a lot more calcium than iron, (in ppm Ca: 400, Fe: 0.003[1]). So all the evolved mechanisms from shells to (cuddle) bone were in place due to available materials long before any other possibility presented itself.

[1] [http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm](http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm)

</comment><comment><USER21> Also from an engineering standpoint, I would think that just metal-izing the skeleton wouldn't be very helpful. You'd just switch to breaking all of the tendons and ligaments and other connective tissue first instead. So you'd need to strengthen those up too, and in a way that is still as durable and repairable.

Then all of this stuff is adding more weight, we're going to need bigger or more powerful muscles to move it around well. Then we'll need bigger/better heart, lungs, circulatory system to fuel that extra muscle power, and improved digestive system to get more energy for that stuff into the body. Skin is seeming kinda fragile with all of this extra bone strength and muscle power, better toughen that up too.

<comment><USER22> I think I have wondered far more often why bones aren't made from a substance stiff enough to act as anchor points for tendons, but also flexible enough to bend over and then snap back to its original shape without breaking. The bending stiffness and yield strength seem very important for the types of stresses on a biological organism.

So why aren't our bones made out of polyimide-polyamide-fiberglass composite?

<comment><USER21> I don't know enough biology to be sure, but I'm pretty sure that some of our ribs are fairly flexible in this way. I would guess, if we had to come up with a reason why those bones are flexible and our arms and legs, say, aren't, it's that the tradeoff in ability to exert large forces in a predictable way and taking bigger impacts before breaking isn't worth it.

Not that evolution is able to actively design things in that way, of course. More like it was an evolutionary advantage for those ribs to be flexible, but any flexibility in arm and leg bones and other major bones was not an advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Evolution is also an optimization engine. Living creatures are not over- engineered because doing so requires additional resources, and resources are limited. Creatures that are not over-engineered are "fitter".

For example: during a famine, perhaps a growing child with "normal" bones is much more likely to survive than a steel-boned counterpart who is unable to find the required extra iron ore and energy needed to grow.

<comment><USER24> I know this is pretty much a nerdy tangent, but something similar is discussed often in Star Trek with the Klingon anatomy. Supposedly every major organ has a redundancy (though I'm not sure they really mean EVERY organ). It's seen as a strategic advantage by many for beings who live a violent lifestyle, but some question it as over-engineering. With twice the organs there's the potential for twice as many things to go wrong during a normal lifespan.

If you consider the fact that human males who live to 80 have a 80% chance of prostate cancer (IRL not Star Trek), it seems like we live with time-bombs that do eventually go off.

<comment><USER25> Did Klingons genetically engineer themselves? If not, this is hard to square with such a (relatively!) hard-science show. In order for that to happen through evolutionary processes, you would have to have chance mutations give them double (or higher) hearts, and that would have to happen for all the organs, and the selection pressure for warriors that survive (otherwise) fatal blows would have to be happening all throughout that process.

<comment><USER24> I've tried to imagine how such a feature could evolve naturally, and I can't really see how. I believe the impression is that it was an evolutionary feature that came about because they were constantly losing major organs. BUT there is quite a bit of genetic engineering and manipulation in Star Trek.

Most of it is to remove genetic birth defects, but there was an entire arc in Enterprise about how a large population of Klingons were genetically altered to give them superior strength and skills. So it's possible that it was related to this, or was engineered at some point in a similar fashion. The whole arc was only to explain why the Klingons looked different in the early series and movies. Berman and Braga tried their best to keep the canon intact, and to have it make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bones can give and break. This can be a benefit. Better to break a bone than rend the flesh in many cases.

<comment><USER27> More importantly, better to break a bone, then let it knit back together more- or-less as it was, than to bend a bone and be stuck with a permanently bent limb.

<comment><USER28> On the other hand, if a fully broken bone isn't set properly, then you are stuck with a permanently bent limb anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Fun read. I was thinking the answer would simply be kind of the same as the reasons for not making an entire plane out of whatever its "indestructible" black box is made of.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, to summarize, we don't have a steel skeleton because

1\. We evilved from the sea, where Calcium is far more abundant than metals 2\. Having a skeleton 100x harder than out current one, would require 100x stronger muscles and tendons, if you don't want them to snap 3\. You couldn't swim with metal bones, which would again be a problem with 1., and make it hard to survive as a species if you drown very easily.

Other arguments, which however, were debunked

1\. It takes too much energy to create steel. It doesn't, maybe twice as much. 2\. You also have other bone functions. However, you could also have those with a semi-steel, semi-organic bone structure. 3\. Bones need to decompose, so that you don't steal too much resources from the environment. Possible argument?

</comment><comment><USER31> > _So let 's look at the facts. The bones in your body are made from material > which has a tensile strength of 150MPa, a strain to failure of 2% and a > fracture toughness of 4MPa(m)½. For a structural material that's not good. > We can make alloy steels that are ten times better in all three of those > properties._

Regular structural steel, used for all sorts of typical building applications, has a yield strength of 250MPa and an ultimate tensile strength of about 400MPa. So bone with it's 150MPa tensile strength, about 60% that of steel's yield strength, is pretty good!

For comparison, typical structural timbers have a tensile strength of around 18MPa.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not an expert in the field, but I'm pretty certain the writer of this piece is neither. He is not using correct units and seems to be misusing the term "fatigue strength".

The proper way of conducting this kind of material comparison would be finding the design limit. In this case it would be probably either toughness/weight of fracture toughness/weight. Then if you are unable to come up with specific grade of metal that simply beats bone, you have absolutely no case. Typically alloying for high strength decreases both toughness and fracture toughness.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bone in fact sucks at repairing itself in the face of age-related degeneration such as osteoporosis, arthritis and such.

If you had titanium bones, you wouldn't become hunch-backed and short in old age, nor would your fingers deform.

<comment><USER19> I would not discount the effect that sedentary lifestyles may have on degenerative diseases. Modern life is a huge confounding variable when evaluating the effectiveness of our bodies.

<comment><USER33> Modern life means having an unprecedented probability of living past forty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Incorporating steel into bones (and, presumably shells) would result in lifeforms that would be very difficult to kill. It may be the case that an ecosystem cannot establish itself if the members' defense mechanisms are too strong. It may be physically impossible to evolve muscles strong enough to crush a steel skull. (Or, at earlier stages, to crush a clam.) Is there not an evolutionary pressure that tempers the establishment of defense mechanisms (such as steel-plate covered creatures) that are too effective?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm not so interested in what bones are made of - I've never broken one. However, I'd love it if my joints could be replaced with something less awful.

<comment><USER36> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGUhVelktk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGUhVelktk4) [http://www.toddbumgardner.com/hip-and-shoulder-mobility- the-...](http://www.toddbumgardner.com/hip-and-shoulder-mobility-the-cars- solution/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Evolution is all about local optimas. If you can't reach your goal with just a series of small improvements, it can't happen. The article claims an organism could just eat metal ores. Sure, but to do that you need to start with an organism that already eats and digests ores. Presumably calcium bones evolved in an organism that already had a lot of calcium in it's diet for other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER38> For starters: the body would oxidise them & they would rust, and the detached flakes would travel to other parts of the body, blocking blood vessels or causing iron poisoning.

A better question would be: why haven't organisms evolved which use iron in their skeletons?

<comment><USER17> Bone is a composite material, made of calcium phosphate interwoven with collagen fibers. It's not clear to me that structural bits of iron would integrate well into this structure.

<comment><USER38> It's not clear to me what your point is. Are you saying that my suggestion that the article should have addressed a different (similar) hypothetical is at odds with your imagination and the physical structure of bone?

<comment><USER17> It's an answer to your question "why haven't organisms evolved which use iron in their skeletons". The physical structure of bone would not be improved by incorporating more iron, so there's no reason for evolution to move in that direction.

<comment><USER38> That's not my question… that's the question I would have preferred the article addressed. I already gave an answer to the question in my original comment.

Also, the 'explanation' begs the question, why wouldn't we see a bone replacement evolve that's suited for iron reinforcement? Your clarificiation is a small step down the 'whys', but saying "because bones have evolved to use calcium" is tautological.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y How much heavier could one's bones get before they would not be able to swim anymore?

<comment><USER39> To answer that question, have you ever tried to swim with a 1kg weight belt? Such devices are commonly used by scuba divers to maintain neutral buoyancy.

Or put it another way, the difference in density between seawater and fresh water is about 3%, and it's noticeably easier to swim in the sea. So if you have bone replacements that make you 3% heavier, you should expect to notice it.

<comment><USER40> At least part of the ballast normally carried by divers is to compensate for the buoyancy of either a wet- or dry-suit, and for the buoyancy of SCUBA tanks (some are buoyant when empty, at least in seawater [1].) Treading water while carrying an extra kilogram would be quite a struggle for many people.

On the other hand, the article compares bone to metals on an equal-weight basis.

[1] [http://www.huronscuba.com/equipment/scubaCylinderSpecificati...](http://www.huronscuba.com/equipment/scubaCylinderSpecification.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's a cool idea and forgive me if I'm wrong but don't the bones in the body create new T & blood cells using the bone marrow? If every bone was replaced in your body how would you generate new cells?

<comment><USER42> Easy: Exchange the blood for something entirely different, too ...

<comment><USER41> Trust me I'd replace blood with transmission fluid any day but that's pretty far from an organic being eh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Bones not only have to be structurally sound, they also have to be decomposable. Otherwise skeletons would never go away, and it would be too difficult to reclaim the raw materials from them.

I also have the opinion that bones enable healthier predator/prey relationships _because_ they're just weak enough to get pulverized by a larger physical force (i.e. from a predator). I realize teeth could be steel as well, but in that case muscle would no longer be enough to completely crush a skeleton.

Nature really seems to value materials that are just strong enough to get the job done, but just weak enough to get reclaimed easily.

<comment><USER40> Even if the current situation is a global optimum in the sense you propose, it would be purely coincidental, as evolution doesn't do global optimization or long-term planning, and prey does not adapt for the convenience of its predators.

<comment><USER43> Everything in evolution is coincidental though, right? It's all about simple survivability of traits. If one of the traits introduces an imbalance (at a micro/macro level), it'll eventually sort itself out.

<comment><USER40> I think I see what you are getting at, in that the mutations that initiate each evolutionary step are random, but selection is not random. It is not a coincidence that Impalas and Cheetahs can run at about the same speed, and it is not a coincidence that Pronghorns can run as if they were prey for Cheetahs, as until relatively recently, they were. This does not mean that every coincidence in biology has an evolutionary origin.

<comment><USER43> That's true... it's impossible to say what's a coincidence and what's not with respect to a given predator/prey relationship. Usually you see a pretty fair match up though. I always think it's interesting when you see a species that is seemingly over-engineered for the purposes of hunting or staying alive:

[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151014-superpowers-of- the-n...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151014-superpowers-of-the-near- invincible-velvet-ant)

[http://www.newsweek.com/orcas-killing-great-white-sharks- eat...](http://www.newsweek.com/orcas-killing-great-white-sharks-eating- livers-607002)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yo this guy just explained the rock eater in Neverending Story

</comment><comment><USER45> Aren't all biological tissues made out of proteins? I mean, the very mechanism of DNA transcription implies that products are necessarily polymer-like, if I understand correctly. DNA can't make metals. I suppose some purely enzymatic mechanism could produce 3D-cristals (a metal is a macroscopic aggregate of microscopic crystals, right?), but apparently no such mechanism exists. It'd be great though, as we could probably replicate it.

I would also say that nature does make metals, it just needs to go through a behavioral layer.</comment>


Android KitKat - <AUTHOR> http://www.android.com/kitkat <comment><USER2> I don't get why people are extrapolating corporate stuff out of this. Google needed a candy/desert that began with 'K'. KitKats are delicious, and its pretty hard to think of anything else that fits the pattern (I saw 'key lime pie' thrown around a bunch, but I think that's more of a stretch.)

<comment><USER3> Key lime pie, Kugel, Kringle, Kifli, Kulfi, Klondike, etc. But hey, KitKat works.

<comment><USER4> Shout out to the Racine Kringle Company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Google told the BBC that it had come up with the idea and that neither side was paying the other."

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938)

<comment><USER6> The incredible take-away from that article is that the deal was struck 24 hours after a cold-call to Nestle's marketing switchboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Text from my friend: "The new Android version is apparently named Kitkat. HN is distressed."

</comment><comment><USER8> KitKat is very fragmented already! ;) [1]

[1] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/lydiah/35-kit-kat-varieties-from- aro...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/lydiah/35-kit-kat-varieties-from-around-the- world-18d7)

<comment><USER9> A huge number are from Japan. Man, they love their KitKats! I've actually tasted the Wasbe KitKat. It was pretty horrible, too.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't Japan have a huge variety of all sorts of food and drink, in general? Something about the huge amount of vending machines, and needing to grab attention with something different?

<comment><USER11> Combini stores, vending machines everywhere… And that goddamn Suica!

Somehow they can afford having a convenience store (combini) open 24h each 350 yards and at each side of the street. Economy at an amazing scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, product placement. Immediately brought this to mind: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs)

<comment><USER13> Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was excited to learn about a new Android release but all I got was a transfer to the KitKat candybar site at the bottom and a manipulative "See if you have won!!! aka go buy some kitkats" at the top.

<comment><USER15> They just released it today to counter the iPhone press conference confirmation.

<comment><USER16> *announced it. See the bottom of the page, its a mailing list for when they release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> KitKats aren't a dessert item, they're a cheap brand of candy people buy at gas stations or at the grocery store checkout line either because they want some no-thrills candy to snack on, or because their kids won't shut up.

If given the choice between a delicious eclair, or the frozen yogurt, and a plain old package of KitKats, I would choose eclair or the froyo. Quite a few people probably would too. This is because KitKats are inferior. Some people will even add crumpled KitKats to their frozen yogurt much in the same way they might add sprinkles.

Anyway, you guys get what I'm saying. I basically think it was a bad idea to name the latest version of android "KitKat". Key Lime Pie is classier.

<comment><USER18> You could apply the same criticism to Jellybean. Or, for that matter, Ice Cream Sandwich. (Ice cream is a dessert, but ICS can only be interpreted as cheap prepackaged food.)

<comment><USER17> I don't know, I used to go out of my way to buy those Jelly Belly brand Jellybeans, but I do agree that ice cream sandwichs and for that matter donuts are a cheap food, kinda realized that while I was thinking about the post.

Still, KitKats really stood out to me as just less wholesome compared to the other dessert items Google has chosen for android versions, if that makes any sense. I've had some fun experiences with trying out weird flavors of jelly beans, or eating ice cream sandwiches during the summer.

As for donuts, I got the wild idea a few years back to to be an organic farmer, to the point where I dropped out of school and actually worked as a sort of vegetable grower/manager for a while. If I was running behind and didn't have time to cook, I would visit any one of the locally-owned donut shops, occasionally run by some owner of Czech heritage (something about Czechs and really good pastries), and pick something up. So despite donuts being ridiculously unhealthy, they bring back interesting feelings.

KitKats, they don't quite have that emotional effect on me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [PUN WARNING] it's a breaking change

<comment><USER20> Give me a break...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just hope they fix Bluetooth.

I have a very nice Bluetooth keyboard that simply does not work on Nexus devices because 4.3 broke Bluetooth keyboard mappings. It's fixable by rooting and renaming a certain file, but dammit, it should work out of the box.

<comment><USER21> Can't forget that GOOG just added AVRCP 1.3 support, after 2+ years and hundreds of comments on the issue [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5450](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5450). Also, Bluetooth Low Energy support, again, greatly delayed.

Apple has had AVRCP 1.4 since iPhone 4S :(

(I just really want cover art in my car!)

<comment><USER22> I just wish my car supported A2DP streaming instead of just voice streaming over Bluetooth... 3.5mm or USB cable doesn't even supply the song's name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Krass as fuck. Really deeply irritated by Google deciding to sully their product by associating with scumbags like Nestle:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestle#Controversy_and_criticism

Please excuse my sweariness but I am somewhat put out.

Also, KitKats taste like shit.

<comment><USER24> Is the deal with Nestle, or Hershey's (which represents KitKat in the USA.) The Android.com/KitKat page points to [http://www.hersheys.com/kitkat.aspx](http://www.hersheys.com/kitkat.aspx), at least for me in the US.

<comment><USER25> I assume with Nestle, the IP holder. Hershey's makes KitKats under license; I'd be amazed if they have the right to use the trademark any way they feel like as a part of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So I take it Lollipop is then next? That is assuming google follows the alphabetic confectionary nomenclature.

<comment><USER27> Then M&M?

<comment><USER28> This deal with KitKat may well set the precedent for that to happen! In fact, wouldn't be surprised if the marketing/branding folks at M & M and other candy manufacturers are already thinking along these lines.

<comment><USER27> My GF isn't a techy person, but she asks "What's with this Android KitKat thing!?". So I explain it to her. She says "I MUST HAVE A KITKAT."

Of course...I also got a KitKat...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well this guarantees my sister isn't getting an Android (she's part of the Nestlé boycott since they continue to push breast milk replacements on people living in poverty)

</comment><comment><USER30> For those worried about Google coming to blows with Nestle (How we still lament the demise of Rowntrees)...

From Wikipedia 'kit kat':

Use of the name "Kit Kat" or "Kit Cat" for a type of food goes back to the 18th century, when mutton pies known as a Kit-Kat were served at meetings of the political Kit-Cat Club in London.

Now a mutton pie doesn't quite sound as sweet a desert.

<comment><USER31> Kit Kat is also a famous sex club in Berlin nightlife.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KitKatClub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KitKatClub)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is just a reminder how "hidden scroll" content is such bad UX, how many of you noticed the little triangle / scrolled down and found out there is more? I found out only accidentally.

<comment><USER33> i just assumed there would be more and scrolled down, worked out.. but yeah, not very apparent otherwise

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I predict that the name "KitKat" was selected not only for cross marketing purposes, but also to serve as a handy metaphor for the key enhancement to Android 4.4. I suspect Google has reengineered Android to allow for modular system-level updates, while leaving user-space modifications, (such as carrier and manufacturer-added software,) untouched, similar to how Canonical has stated Ubuntu Touch updates will work.

We've already seen Google take a more modular approach to adding Android enhancements via individual application updates to the Play Store, GMail, YouTube, etc. This has allowed users running older versions of Android to take advantage of more up-to-date software, despite the lack of manufacturer- provided updates. Given the degree to which the Play Store service can modify the OS in the current version of Android, it seems reasonable to suspect that these modular updates could be extended to include the kernel, system services, and low-level run times. Google may have decided that they will own and update key portions of the operating system, and leave their partners to focus on updates to their device-specific "enhancements."

This prediction is consistent with the tag line associated with Android 4.4 on the linked page: "It's our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody."

How to explain the value behind such a "behind-the-scenes" feature to the technologically illiterate masses? A KitKat is a modular candy bar. All the fingers are the same. You can swap out a single finger without fundamentally altering the integrity of the whole. Perhaps Eric Schmidt will explain it better on-stage.

</comment><comment><USER35> I assume KitKat has a trick up its sleeve to solve the notorious fragmentation issues that plague Android. Why else would they say "available for everybody"?

<comment><USER36> Most likely what they mean by that is an optimization of the system so that it runs better or low-end (i.e. cheap) devices (think: india, africa, china markets) as currently you need relatively high-end hardware for smooth operation.

"everybody" in this context means "large numbers of people who can't afford high-end hardware"

Google was talking about those optimization plans during last I/O, I believe.

<comment><USER37> I believe they already released most of the interface performance optimizations in 4.3. I would be happy to see more though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can't tell if this is a joke.

<comment><USER39> I think the android.com homepage clinches it:

"We're naming the next version of Android after one of our favorite chocolate treats, KitKat. Look for specially branded KitKat bars in a store near you that give you a chance to win a Nexus 7 or Google Play credit."

This is a tiny bit embarrassing for Google, honestly.

<comment><USER40> I'm okay with this.

Android Lion

Android Mars

Android Nuts

Android Oreo

Android Peppermint Crisp

They'll have to introduce their own brand of chocolate after that.

<comment><USER41> I think Android Quik would be next (and perhaps likely if KitKat goes well given the Nestle connection and the scarcity of "Q" dessert names).

<comment><USER40> It's called Nesquik.

<comment><USER41> And another tiny bit of my childhood dies... :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was sure it was going to be Key Lime Pie

<comment><USER43> I kind of hoped it would be[1] as well.

[http://cdn-static.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/cat/mobiles/key-lime-pi...](http://cdn- static.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/cat/mobiles/key-lime-pie-cartoon.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "KitKat's SEO (for the candy bar) just dove into nothingness. Forever." -my boss

<comment><USER3> I thought you were kidding, but then I checked. Indeed, on Google, android.com/kitkat comes up first, then kitkat.com. On DDG and Bing, search results are still all about the snack.

<comment><USER45> I'm having a harder time telling the natural hits from the ads these days but in mine it's kitkat.com first followed by "news for kitkat", then wikipedia, hershey's, and finally android.

<comment><USER3> This is what my Google SERP looks like in Safari, not logged into Google:

[http://i.imgur.com/hTa6Izu.png](http://i.imgur.com/hTa6Izu.png)

(The Kitkat.com listing has a different description than it did an hour a go, because of the Android tie-in. But even then, the Google Android page was higher up the list.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> it's not Android 5.0 but 4.4. I am curious what functions are still left before we don't need anything new. I mean, with Windows XP, Microsoft had already reached the upper limit of what is enough for anybody. But, somehow I am expecting a surprise on Chrome, ChromeOS, Android integration, but can't guess.

<comment><USER47> It's part of their defragmentation play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> At least it's not Mavericks.

</comment><comment><USER49> Tech users may scoff, but normal people like KitKats. People don't say Google phone or Android, they say Samsung and iPhone.

This is an attempt to make Android a household name like ... Kitkat

</comment><comment><USER50> Software gets me more excited for new hardware than the software itself. I can't wait to get a nexus with kitkat. At this rate we would see Android Whatchamacallit by 2022.

</comment><comment><USER51> Actually, this is a smart move from Google.

They are promoting Google+ with it, as it seems that KitKat is an active user (on G+) and has a lot of members on it.

They are trying to get more bussiness on g+ and refering to the new Android as chocolat. Which probably means they want to create the whole Android experience a lot smoother and unified (judging from the description on [http://www.android.com/kitkat/](http://www.android.com/kitkat/) )

</comment><comment><USER52> well... i didn't know that google was so short on money that needed a sponsored release...

<comment><USER53> This takes silly version names to a whole new level.

I guess it makes sense for an ad company to sell naming rights to some extent, but I can't think of another occurrence of google mixing it's branding like this before. Google historically set themselves apart by keeping ads somewhat separate.

<comment><USER54> More likely is someone chose this name, that conveniently starts with a K, and then they sought out the owners of KitKat to make sure they were okay with it. I'm sure they were, free advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Wow, looks promising. I might take a break from iOS for this.

(Sorry)

<comment><USER56> Me too, can't wait until 2021 to see it on my Android.

 _pointing out one of Google 's major issues: deploying updates in a timely fashion.

Downvotes to this post will show how Google wants to hide this fact_

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how comprehensive Google's agreement with Nestle is?

Today's marketing stunt is fun, but this is an OS name - it is going to live on in history for a decade or more, it is going to be checked into the android git repository. There will be reviews calling "KitKat" a smoking turd, people trashing and trolling it all over the internet. Tim Cook will probably get up on stage and lay into it at some point. People will be making icons and fan art based around it, and pulling all kinds of stunts that would normally catch the ire and get a swift cease and desist from a major company like Nestle.

So has Google negotiated with Nestle that they are not going to suddenly get "uncool" with this and go with the flow? If not, fun as it is, I feel like this could be something that ends badly. Proprietary trademarks and open source don't generally mix well, and when they do you need pretty robust agreements in place.

</comment><comment><USER58> Gimme a break.

<comment><USER59> Hahaha. I hope HN's anti-pun psyche sees through this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> My main gripe about this is that Google is sending the message to consume more toxic junk food to the public, while sending the opposite message to employees. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google- cru...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-crunches- data-on-munching-in- office/2013/09/01/3902b444-0e83-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html)

This is different from the generic names of sweets. This is a specific product, which isn't sold at Whole Foods, and is cheaper, more unhealthy, and less satisfying than what Googlers are likely to buy.

</comment><comment><USER61> Really, dislike this advertising.

Also just realised that "froyo" is not just a made-up name but stands for "frozen yoghurt" [mental process: why's "froyo" got a dish of ice-cream? ah?].

</comment><comment><USER62> Well, seems like Nestle bought itself some geek cred.

</comment><comment><USER63> Android 4.3 was only release a few days ago. I'm surprised they're announcing 4.4 already. Both this link and the BBC article don't have any information about what new features are in this release. Seems pointless to just announce a name.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938)

<comment><USER64> The next Nexus phone should be out in November. They often introduce the newest version of Android on those (all except the Nexus 4, which came with 4.2 introduced on the Nexus 7).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience > available for everybody.

Android optimized for lower powered devices?

<comment><USER65> My first thought was continuing the anti-fragmentation push with more Play Services stuff. I can definitely see an optimisation push though, the spec wars are getting ridiculous and it's still worthy of mention in a review that a phone doesn't lag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Maybe the next release is gonna be called Mars®

<comment><USER67> The next letter in the alphabet is L.

Lollipop seems likely.

<comment><USER54> Or Licorice.

<comment><USER68> Lutefisk.

<comment><USER54> My Norwegian step-father just gave you a thumbs up.

I'm gonna retort with lemondrop. Much more my taste. Although a Lutefisk smoothie does sound _tasty_ ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Clearly Google saw the Microsoft-Nokia headlines, and decided they had to come up with something even crazier than that...

</comment><comment><USER70> Is this serious release or some kind of joke? (not trying to be negative, just wanna be sure if it's serious or not)

</comment><comment><USER71> Posted this in the other thread but I'd really like to know :)

Does anyone know if Kit Kat will be available for the Nexus 4? I ordered one a few days ago and it will be my first smartphone so I have next to no idea how Google deals with providing newer Android releases to "older" phones.

<comment><USER72> One of the main selling points of nexus devices is that they tend to get timely updates (or at least much more timely than other phones). Particularly if you bought through Google Play, Nexus phones tend to get OS updates damn near immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> That is sad :(

I preferred Key Lime Pie (the fact that this is my favourite dessert is only coincidence ;) )

<comment><USER74> kitkat?? dafuq man... what happen to Key Lime Pie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> _buttery graphics_

Really? What does that even mean? Why is it that the only analogy that people can find for "smooth" is "butter"? I actually find butter kind of gooey and greasy.

<comment><USER76> It's a pun towards Project Butter. [http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/android- jelly-bean-official...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/android-jelly-bean- official/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wonder if the success of this tie-up may start a new marketing/branding trend? That is more companies may start doing cross-brand tie ups among non-competing products.

</comment><comment><USER77> They do have KitKats in the mini kitchens at google so at least they are not lying about being fans. Although they are on the bottom red shelf for unhealthy snacks.

</comment><comment><USER78> I wonder how much of revenue from the sales of KitKat, Hershy's would be sharing with Google. Nice Marketing/Sales ploy though.

</comment><comment><USER79> Still have no intention of going back to Android any time soon but I am craving a Kit Kat now, so I guess the joke is on Google here.

</comment><comment><USER80> I wonder if the timing of this annoucement is linked to either:

\- The Note III launch tomorrow

\- The fact that Apple sent out invites for its iPhone event today

</comment><comment><USER81> The power of open source. Shame on Google.

</comment><comment><USER82> How can a FOSS product have a version name which is linked to a closed source recipe?

<comment><USER83> Android is not a FOSS product, there's just parts of it that are open source ("AOSP"). There's a big heap of proprietary parts starting from the kernel level going up to Play Services that are required for a functional Android experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> When Android gets to 'T', they _have_ to choose TicTac.

</comment><comment><USER85> This is only for Android 4.4 (scroll to the end of the link).

</comment><comment><USER6> That awesome landing page literally had me salivating.

</comment><comment><USER74> what about Key Lime Pie??

</comment><comment><USER86> Give me a break..

</comment><comment><USER87> oh, I thought this about nyan cat :(

</comment><comment><USER85> WTF

</comment><comment><USER88> Meanwhile at Willy Wonka's...

"Oompa Loompa Stop Whipping Us, He's Not Sleeping He's Overworked"

</comment><comment><USER89> And to be able to use it, you'll need to buy the next Nexus phone! Or wait till your OEM releases its crapware loaded version in 6-12 months (or never, actually).

Thanks, but I'll stick with iphone/iOS, at least I can update it. (iPhone 4 from 2010 running iOS 6).

<comment><USER90> What did you just add to this discussion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Some years ago "Don't be evil" was Google's motto, however Nestle is far from being a good company, specially KitKat brand.

[http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/kit-kat-give- orang...](http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/forests/kit-kat-give-orang-utan- break-20100317)

[http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle- baby-...](http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby-milk- scandal-food-industry-standards)

<comment><USER92> What a loaded comment. Guilt by association is almost always rubbish.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why? (Also, thank you) - <AUTHOR> I first want to say thank you to the HN community. In a constant search for Truth I have always found HN comments to be my "center". I feel HN to be Honest and Good amuck the Falsehood and Agenda that I find elsewhere in life. So here is my question: why do you share here and what makes HN different? Cheers to a wonderful 2018 and a fulfilling 2019. <comment><USER2> HN was started by nerds - people who cared more about truth and accuracy than they did about popularity or saying the right thing.

HN has _remained_ what it has due to the community, and due to the moderation. Personal attacks get moderated out; repeat offenders get blocked. That lets those who want to have a fact-based discussion continue to have that discussion.

HN is less than perfect. The people here are less than perfect. The moderators are less than perfect. But, for certain types of people, HN is still better than anywhere else.</comment>


The Pirate Bay mirror - <AUTHOR> https://tpb.pirati.cz/

<comment><USER2> nah - does not seem to be...

Front page links Usage policy | Search Cloud | Tag Cloud all blank.

Links in the html point to www.pirati.cz which is the Czech site for what looks to be the Czech Pirate Party.

I don't know enough about the Pirate Party to understand the connections between them and TPB if there are any...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this real? If so, great work.</comment>


Virtual currencies can be exchanged tax-free in Europe after court ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/22/bitcoin-now-tax-free-in-europe-after-court-ruling.html <comment><USER2> This is a horrible headline and directly promotes misunderstanding. One might even call it clickbait.

In reality, virtual currencies can now be exchanged tax-free, effectively putting them in-line with other currencies—no special status has been afforded specifically to Bitcoin that makes it some kind of tax shelter or similar. Capital gains and taxes while spending Bitcoins or real goods and services still apply as with any currency.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on the headline, but more to the point is that now the EU does not draw a distinction between virtual and traditional currencies. Or this is at least a step in that direction.

<comment><USER4> > the EU does not draw a distinction between virtual and traditional > currencies.

This should be the headline...

<comment><USER5> I don't like this nomenclature. Can we call them "state-sponsored" and "stateless" instead? Almost all of the world's currency is as virtual as email.

<comment><USER6> Maybe "bank-issued" currency is more accurate for the more traditional kind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can we change the headline to "sales tax-free" instead of tax-free which indicates something rather different.

<comment><USER8> Europe has no sales tax. Just VAT.

<comment><USER9> Yes, Europe has no conventional sales tax, but VAT is a tax on sales, to be sure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean that Bitcoin has a different tax status in the EU vs the US? If so, does this suggest future bitcoin growth will be favored in one or the other?

<comment><USER11> No, this ruling is in line with how the US does it. Before, it was unclear whether the EU would charge sales tax (VAT) when you buy bitcoins on an exchange. Now it's clear that they won't. The US has never charged sales tax on bitcoin exchanges.

Tax-free is an exaggeration, as bitcoin is still subject to capital gains tax, and of course you'll have to pay sales tax/VAT if you use bitcoin to buy things, just as if you bought the same things with euros or dollars.

<comment><USER12> Wait... then, what __IS__ tax-free about it?

If I still have to pay capital gains tax and sales tax on it, then what's different about taxes in regards to bitcoin vs. government currency?

<comment><USER13> You don't "have to pay sales tax on it" when you buy BTC like you pay sales tax when you buy a banana. But you still have to pay sales tax when you purchase a banana with BTC.

<comment><USER14> Except Bananas are zero VAT rated, meaning no VAT is paid on them either. :)

<comment><USER13> Heh, should have checked before I made the assumption.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommended conferences for a senior SRE? - <AUTHOR> I have "a friend" at work - a Site Reliability Enginner
What would be a good conference for him to visit ? He initially wanted to go to SC17 but i don't think he will enjoy himself there.
Any recommendation ?!
We do mostly HFT, advanced VPNs, back end clusters <comment><USER2> Well, "i don't think he will enjoy himself there"... what's the goal? Is it to learn something or to have fun? ;) ;)

I would recommend stepping a little outside his/her comfort zone and learn something completely different or adjacent to the current skill-set. For example, if the primary end-user of his efforts is a VPC on HyperV, adjacent: go to a Microsoft virtualization conference; completely different: go to vmWorld.

Also consider locale and time of year. Vegas can be brutal in the summers, but the fall and spring are Goldilocks.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17)

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18americas](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18americas)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looks interesting!

<comment><USER3> You are welcome! Hope to see you there! I'll be teaching "Setting up CI/CD pipelines" at LISA. [https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/training- program/se...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa17/training- program/session/setting-cicd-pipelines)</comment></comment></comment>


Tizen: Open source Intel/Linux Foundation-backed mobile/device OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.tizen.org/

<comment><USER2> So, yet another Linux distribution (why do they keep calling it an OS is beyond me) backed up by Intel... Why?

Why do they think they need a new OS for "Html5 apps" and not make evolve MeeGo, except for political reasons?

Why do they think they need to restrict the APIs, like in MeeGo (and it took them quite some time) for desktop or for Html5 applications; why not just check the requirements at the publishing stage on their appstore?

I might be missing something obvious...

<comment><USER3> I don't understand it either. And the constant jumping from project to project on the part of Intel can't be helpful.

<comment><USER4> I think they are trying throw new names at the wall of hype and see if one sticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a source that was at Nokia/Meego: "Summary: Intel has joined LiMo project. Samsung has renamed it to save Intel's face. Qt is abandoned and KDE too is hurt unless . . . unless HTC takes MeeGo!"

</comment><comment><USER6> Yet another start of a mobile Linux backed by Intel, yet another, non- backwards-compatible UI stack.

Previous ones were: Moblin (Gtk and Clutter) and MeeGo (Qt and QML). Now Tizen (HTML5, whatever that means in this case). Will be hard to convince developers that they'll really stick to this one.

<comment><USER7> Technically they could bundle GTK3 and get Waypoint HTML5 apps for free.

<comment><USER8> An HTML5 app is an app written using HTML5. A GTK app is an app written using GTK. A GTK3 app rendered on an <canvas> is still a GTK app.

<comment><USER7> Right, despite the downvote (what don't we downvote for these days people), this platform (can and may [if some rumors thus far are true]) support GTK. I don't know what your reply is supposed to mean. (I suppose it may have been from my poor use of the phrasing "Waypoint HTML5 apps" although if we're going to nitpick over it, I would argue a frontend rendered in HTML5/canvas at least partially qualifies for the moniker.)

My point is that since this will likely ship with the GTK3 runtime support, it can render to a web app interface. Meaning that the Tizen project maintainers or consumers can write GUIs that just handle HTML5 "cards" like in WebOS (as they seem to allude is their goal), and be able to utilize any applications built for GTK3 without having to shim in new elements to their window manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Tizen will provide a robust and flexible environment for application developers, based on HTML5 and Wholesale Applications Community (WAC)"

I hadn't heard of WAC before. WAC's about page makes it sound like an app store and a set of APIs [1]. Whatever that actually means, WAC has backing by a _lot_ of big companies [2].

[1] <http://www.wacapps.net/what-is-wac>

[2] <http://www.wacapps.net/our-members>

<comment><USER10> It seems like the Big Telcos attempt at doing what Apple did with the App Store. Their biggest fear have always been to be reduced to a "dumb data pipe", which is basically what has happened now with the iPhone and Android (notice how Apple and Google are not participating members :)

You can be sure that WAC will be prominently featured on any handset where the operator has any influence.

Maybe it will work, or maybe it will be the next WAP, time will tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tizen appears to be replacing MeeGo. The MeeGo blog has a post "What's next for MeeGo": <https://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2011/whats-next-meego>

As Samsung are on board, I guess Tizen may be taking parts of their existing Linux platform: [http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/02/samsung-is- backing-...](http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/02/samsung-is-backing- linux-slp.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> OK, look, my head is spinning here. This quote from The Verge:

//The MeeGo project is already encouraging its members to make the transition to Tizen, going so far as to say that it believes the "future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5."

I just don't understand how this then differs from webOS! Can someone make this clear to me? Why reinvent the wheel? Do they feel webOS is now cursed or what?

From a coder's perspective, what's the real difference here?

[typo edit]

<comment><USER12> In a word, licencing.

WebOS isn't open source, and is never likely to be.

<comment><USER11> Why couldn't they band together, buy webOS, and then open source that? Spread over the number of members, the investment would be less than starting from scratch or trying to resolve incompatibilities between all these groups looking to cut their own slice of cheese.

<comment><USER13> Follow the B2G commit logs; they're actually building stuff. Intel is starting from scratch every other year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems destined for mediocrity. Lacking vision and passion.

"Lets create a linux platform for every single device that isn't a computer."

Bleh.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hum.. the name sounds that it's something that came from Texas Instruments: "Texas Instruments Zen"

</comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to see Samsung in the dev team, does that mean Bada will be joining the new OS?

<comment><USER17> Maybe not Bada, but LiMo, and presumably now Tizen, is not just GTK. It also includes support for EFL (aka Enlightenment/E17), a project Samsung has been supporting for the past few years.* The EFL Webkit port is also progressing, also with Samsung support.

Hopefully being HTML5 buzzword-compliant doesn't mean they're dropping all support for native apps too.

* As previously discussed: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495826>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Open source webOS replacement with Web Intents, SSE, etc? Yes, please. Where do I sign up? I'd like to know how this stacks up to boot2gecko (which theoretically can already reach all of the Android devices that CM runs on.

<comment><USER18> Gecko won't run on ARMv6 processors, which rules out a significant number of devices CM runs on. But, I get your point.

What does something like Tizen offer developers beyond standard HTML5; why not just target browsers?

<comment><USER13> That's entirely the point. Tizen can't entice developers to choose their platform, so they aren't even going to try. They're just going to make the best HTML5-backed phone they can. Hopefully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the development stack should be based on native elements instead of GTK or Qt or HTML5, it may include have a web based development and native including C++/Java.Idea , purely, based on WebOS really sucks.</comment>


Tuts+ accounts hacked - User passwords stored in CLEARTEXT - <AUTHOR> http://notes.envato.com/general/tuts-premium-security

<comment><USER2> They _knew_ the "plugin" stores passwords in clear text and still chose to use it.

I don't care if they had a plan to move away from it. That's not good enough.

Seriously how fucking hard is it to do things properly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly, this was a disaster waiting to happen. Not that it would ever happen, but if websites were required to disclose how sensitive information was stored, I'd guess this sort of intrusion would be far less common, since no one would use a site that left passwords unencrypted/salted/hashed. Tuts+ is a HUGE service... 660 on Alexa today. I am beyond frustrated.

Makes a big case for OAuth in my mind.

<comment><USER2> I wish you were right, but check out the comments on the original article. Plenty of people whose response is "these things happen, good luck guys"

Plenty of developers have no fuckin clue about basic security, so why would users of a tutorial site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is Tuts+ about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Subscription-based Web/Photoshop/Illustrator/AV tutorials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the irony.</comment>


Consciousness as a State of Matter - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 <comment><AUTHOR> Has this been posted before here at HN ?

<comment><USER2> Yes, 4 months ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024651) Use the search feature at the bottom of the page here.</comment></comment>


How I use the good parts of AWS Cloud while filtering out all the hype - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1154516910265884672 <comment><USER2> Interesting that he doesn't mention ECS. I've found that to be a huge improvement over VMs for exactly the workload he's describing.</comment>


Show HN: Optimizing First-Frame Bitrate for HLS with Edge Compute - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stackpath.com/optimize-hls-bitrate/ <comment><USER2> This seems like the kind of thing CDNs should be offering to do for you, or at the very least have available in their app marketplaces. The idea isn't even that complicated. But I love the MITM model here. Get file from origin or cache, parse, manipulate, pass on. Pretty cool.</comment>